Black billionaire and engineer Robert F. Smith’s private equity firm Vista Equity Partners announced last week it has plans to sell Marketo—marketing automation software company—to Adobe for $4.75 billion. Vista purchased the company in 2016 and will make $3 billion in two years from the sale, the largest in the firm’s history.
Adobe intends to add Marketo’s engagement platform to its Adobe Experience Cloud enabling the company to expand its set of solutions, delivering what it calls a “transformative customer experiences across industries and companies of all sizes.”
“Adobe and Marketo both share an unwavering belief in the power of content and data to drive business results,” said Steve Lucas, CEO of Marketo in the news release. “Marketo delivers the leading B2B marketing engagement platform for the modern marketer, and there is no better home for Marketo to continue to rapidly innovate than Adobe.”
Smith is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who founded his technology investment firm in 2000 to invest in software companies. Today, Vista is a leader in the investment space and is the largest black-owned private equity firm in the U.S, according to Black Enterprise.
In 2016, Vista began focusing on purchasing software companies in their growth stages and bought Marketo, which was struggling with revenue growth, for $1.8 billion.
